Raw Hair vs. Virgin Hair

The human hair industry is unregulated and therefore manufacturers and brands can call the hair they sell anything they want. The purpose of this article is to clarify any confusion around the definitions of hair and for Indique clients to understand what Indique sources with confidence and trust.

The progression of human hair definitions started in the early 2000s in the following chronology: (1) 100% Human Hair, (2) Remy Hair, (3) Virgin Hair, (4) Raw Hair

Before the launch of “bundles”, the highest quality hair that was sold was called “100% human hair” and this was only available at the beauty supply stores. The brands like Bobbi Boss, Sensationel and others would market the quality of the product by saying that the hair was good for 4 washes or 8 washes. The higher the number of washes the better the quality of the hair. This hair was all non-remy, falled hair that was collected in India and exported to China to be acid washed, colored, coated in silicone, wefted and then exported to the United States. Compared to what Indique sells this was/is low quality hair. It can still be found in beauty supply stores across America and online via Aliexpress.

The term Remy hair was developed by the temples in India. They identified the hair they sold at auction as Remy Single Drawn or RSD. This remy hair was cut directly from the heads of donors at the temples. The difference between this hair and 100% human hair was that Remy Hair had the cuticles intact and aligned from root to tip. This was and is the product that Indique has been purchasing from the temples in South India for more than 20 years, however, over the twenty years this hair has been sold with many different names as companies and brands try and protect the hair they are selling from inferior fallen hair or non remy hair that unethical companies sell as remy hair. Remy hair was/is hair that you can wash, bleach, curl and use like everyday hair. Indique branding this product and bringing it to the market in a consistent high quality brand was a market innovation in the industry.

When Indique started becoming popular for its high quality remy hair, the incumbent human hair brands took notice and renamed their human hair (fallen hair) brands as Remy hair. Due to there being no regulations in the industry, the human hair brands could call their hair anything they wanted without any repercussions; it’s like selling cheap cotton but branding it as premium pashmina. The cost of human hair was 50% less than Remy hair, but the human hair companies were selling at the same price as Indique’s remy hair. Understanding this, Indique created a new name for the product, Virgin hair. Virgin hair was a new product in the market because stylists were only familiar with weave hair made from the standard human hair that could not be washed continuously, dyed, bleached, curled, straightened or anything else you can do to your own hair. End users, stylists and salon owners had to be educated on Indique’s virgin hair and it’s versatility, durability and of course price. The premium virgin hair that Indique offers is sourced from the temples of India and so the cost is determined by the Temple auction price. Whereas, fallen or non remy hair is determined by supply and demand; it can be collected and sold or not collected and sold based on the factories in China’s demand. Indique developed the term virgin hair extensions in 2007 with the launch of its retail brand and this became and is the gold standard in the hair extension industry. Fast forward to 2018 and the rise of Aliexpress and chinese online retailers who now sell their fallen or non remy hair as Virgin hair without any regulations. Concurrently the rise of many other virgin hair companies in USA - who purchased their hair from chinese suppliers selling them what they believed to be remy virgin hair - had to fight against these discount priced Chinese online hair brand selling virgin hair at 50% of the price of American brands. A few of the American brands decided to coin the term Raw hair to try and differentiate themselves from the Chinese vendors. They could not beat them on price and the quality was the same - the American brands were buying from the Chinese - so they had to come up with another marketing tactic to try and separate themselves.

The progression of hair naming has finally arrived at raw hair. It started with 100% Human Hair, Remy Hair, then Virgin Hair and now Raw Hair. The changes in the name are all due to there being no regulation on what hair can and cannot be called, therefore forcing companies to keep looking for a new name that will separate their brand from the next company.

Ultimately the name of the hair does not determine the quality because hair bundles can be called anything. What is most important is knowing where the hair the brand you are purchasing from sources their hair - and most brands do not know where their hair is sourced. They don’t visit the factories and if they do visit the factories they simply believe what the factory tells them about where the hair is collected - this is the case with 100% of the factories in China. No factory in China will tell their customer where the actually get the hair because their sourcing is primarily non-remy hair through a black market sourcing supply from India, through Burma and then China.

Indique does not hide behind product names, our product is all the above: it’s 100% human hair, it’s Remy hair, it’s Virgin hair and it’s Raw hair. However, most important is that we source our own hair - we know where the hair comes from, we’ve visited our factories hundreds of times, we have our own quality assurance teams on the ground in Asia, our CEO and the team personally visits the factories at least once every quarter and we are committed to a superior level of hair quality through our extensive quality assurance process. When you purchase Indique you know that you have purchased the highest quality virgin or raw hair.